


remember us, if at all

by bendingwind



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-12
Updated: 2011-08-12
Packaged: 2017-11-06 00:23:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Memory is such a funny, fragile thing. Based on a prompt by triala @ <a href="http://watch-them-run.livejournal.com/66280.html">watch-them-run</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	remember us, if at all

Memory is such a funny, fragile thing.

So easily created, and so easily destroyed.

Once, when she was sad and lonely and the most afraid she ever felt in the entire, long span of her life, he asked her a question, and she didn’t answer, “spoilers.” He knew who and what she was, she reasoned, what more could it hurt for her to tell him, prematurely, what they were? The look in his eyes, curious and fascinated but not at all in love, was more than she could bear.

And so she leaned into him, pressing forehead to forehead, and remembered for him. Mad dashes through galleries of priceless paintings, scrambled reconstructions of lethally-broken machinery, one particularly memorable side-trip where they had accidentally elevated themselves to the status of gods, battles and manipulations and tests… laughter, smiles, kisses stolen in corridors with dangerous government agents just five minutes behind them, the sticky slick motion of skin against hot skin…

He gasped and pulled away, staring at her with eyes that finally, finally looked as old and as wise and as horribly sad as she remembered.

“You’re so much sadder when I know you,” she whispers, reaching up to caress his cheek. “Is that because of me, my love?”

“Yes,” he answers, hoarsely.

“Would you rather…” her voice breaks, but she must ask him this now, when he has only hollow memories of love and not the overpowering emotion itself, “Would you rather that, that you had never met me?”

His response is so quiet that she strains to hear it. “In five hundred years of gallivanting about the universe, River, I have never regretted meeting a single person.”

She cries, and for the last and first time, he holds her close and rubs her back. Minutes pass before she pulls away, composed but for her reddened eyes, and smiles roguishly at him.

“What do you know of the lost technological technology of Lamasteen?” she asks.

Later that night, she will sneak into his room, and do the one thing she promised never to do; she will take the memories she gave him back, because she knows that this never happened, that the day she shared all her spoilers was never real.

After all, reality exists only in memory.

 

* * *


End file.
